Saturday, March 16, 2013

New Dinosaur in the works...

New dinosaur in the works, Parasaurolophus. I'm just about done detailing him, then all the posing will begin!

Unlike the previous dinosaur, which from start to finish was done in Zbrush, this one I started in Blender as a box and slowly modeled it out to get the best topology flow I could. I had a lot of issues on the Carnotaurus with having too many polygons in one area while not having nearly enough in another, and in the end the sculpt is very uneven (and required a massive amount of polygons to fix such unevenness.) By the end of sculpting the Carnotaurus I had somewhere around 9 million vertices, which made the file incredibly bloated.

So for this one I started off in Blender, and took the time to slowly model out where I wanted the topology to go and how much information I wanted to devote to each area. Here's an example of the model about 70-80% done with its box modeling. Before I brought it into Zbrush I did bulk up the number of edge loops in various areas as I tested importing the model to see where I might need it for sculpting later.

Once I did that and tweaked any last minute silhouette adjustments, I imported it into Zbrush. By this point a major bulk of the modeling was done, and with such an accurate sculpt, a lot of my time in Zbrush has just been refinement and detailing, mainly making muscles appear and creating skin folds. I initially didn't model him with an open mouth, but decided that my future poses might necessitate it, so I opened him up in Zbrush and added more geometry.

From then on, it's just been detail, detail detail. I'm about 90% done with him, and the last 10% is going to go by real quickly. From there I'll make a master pose file and rig him so I can easily set up a variety of poses.